Read Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century

I loved this witty farce of a book until Waugh wussed out on the ending. Poor Tony, trapped in the Amazon reading Dickens to a madman for eternity… puh-leeze. Abrupt shifts in tone and theme are all well and good, but Waugh wasn’t writing that kind of a novel. Thumbs down.

J.P. Donleavy’s Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, American in Dublin, is a goddamn hilarious wastrel. Also a complete asshole. Reminded me a bit of Withnail and I, without the heartwarming buddy stuff.

Forster lays the Transcendentalism on a bit thick in this one, but the last few lines are haunting. Like the keystone slid into the top of the arch.

A very poised and elegant novel by a very poised and elegant author.

“For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.”

-Ralph Ellison

That sounds about right. Faulkner is the man to beat.

Truly, as Martin Amis says in the introduction, the Great American Novel. And, as he also says, it wouldn’t be right if the Great American Novel didn’t have something wrong with it. But O! Caligula!

Graham Greene’s moody meditation on God, love, and responsibility, set in an obscure English colony on the West Coast of Africa during WWII. The heartbreaking ending unfolds as inevitably as a Greek tragedy.

This breezy philosophical comedy by Iris Murdoch feels rather slight at first, but the ending is inexplicably moving. There is something very subtle going on here beneath the surface. Definitely worth reading.

The New York Public Library finally demanded Finnegans Wake back, and here me only two-thirds through. I picked up Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange while I was there and put it down in half a day or so. I’m a big fan of Kubrick’s film, of course, but apparently he dropped the final chapter from the script (since he adapted the film from the American version of the novel, which also dropped the final chapter) and there was a big controversy about it. Burgess argues that without the final chapter, in which the main character ‘grows up’ and becomes tired of ultra-violence, A Clockwork Orange becomes merely a fable or allegory where grimy human nature is set in stone, and not a novel where characters change and there is the possibility of hope. I for one prefer the American-Kubrick version. The novel – erm, fable – packs a bit more punch when the final line reads: ‘I was cured all right.’ Burgess’ version ends with the malenky bit vonny slovos: ‘Amen. And all that cal.’
There is a blurb by Burroughs on the back of the book where that old master of nonsense says, surprisingly, ‘I do not know of any other writer who has done as much with language as Mr. Burgess has done here.’ Burroughs should have known better. Burgess owes most of his technique – the invention of nonsense words, the borrowing and transformation of words from other languages – from Joyce, as I now know from reading as much as I have of his Finnegans Wake. Even the wonderful coinage ‘horrorshow’ that Burgess employs to such excellent effect, an anglicisation of the russian ‘horosho’ meaning ‘excellent’, appeared first in Joyce in the ‘How Buckley Shot the Russian General’ segment of the ‘Tavernry in Feast’ chapter of Finnegans Wake.
All of which is not meant to knock Burgess too much. His novel or fable or however one will have it is still damn entertaining.

I took a short break from slogging through Finnegans Wake today to read The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, a slim volume of 130 pages or so. I put it down in about three hours, nonstop. It’s a very absorbing tale about five obliquely connected lives brought to an unexpected end by the sudden collapse of an ancient Incan bridge. One of its critics described the book as “some faultless temple erected to a minor deity.” Another compares it to an orchid of “intricate beauty.” I can certainly see why Wilder was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for it, despite the rather heavy-handed framing of the issue in question – chance vs. design – and a few overly mawkish moments. A great read.